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Stephen Lewis: The interview

Canadian social justice icon Stephen Lewis is speaking at the 30th Anniversary Gala for the Howe Sound Women's Centre taking place at the West Coast Railway Heritage Park in Squamish on Saturday, April 14.
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Stephen Lewis with Patricia and Nonhlanhla at Blue Roof in South Africa. Photo by Gillian Mathurin

Canadian social justice icon Stephen Lewis is speaking at the 30th Anniversary Gala for the Howe Sound Women's Centre taking place at the West Coast Railway Heritage Park in Squamish on Saturday, April 14.

Lewis, a politician, broadcaster, author, educator and diplomat, is perhaps best known for his work in recent years as United Nations special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, and for the work of the Stephen Lewis Foundation, which supports dozens of projects in Africa. He is the former leader of the Ontario New Democrats and gave the eloquent eulogy at the funeral of federal NDP leader Jack Layton in August 2011. He is currently the Distinguished Visiting Professor at Ryerson University in Toronto.

Lewis granted Pique an interview which runs this week and in our next issue, out on April 5.

Tickets for the gala, which also includes Katrina Pacey of the Pivot Legal Society, may be purchased at www.womeninfluenceourworld.eventbrite.ca

Pique: You spoke in Whistler a few years ago and now Squamish. What brings you to back?

Stephen Lewis: It's an anniversary do, and I would speak at any women's cause because I believe very deeply in the struggle for gender equality, and particularly the struggle against sexual violence, which has preoccupied me in the last couple of years in my work internationally.

To speak on an evening which is discussing issues relevant to women's rights strikes me as important. There are other speakers (too) so I will be fascinated to see what they have to say and get a chance to sound off.

Pique: How important has it been in your career as a speaker to speak to relatively smaller audiences and communities?

SL: Oh, I'm a socialist so I'm used to speaking to mass audiences of two and four! I'm not at all beknighted by a small audience, that doesn't worry me. If they're interested in the subject matter and it can be ultimately more conversational than rhetorical then that's fine with me!

I've spent a lifetime tramping around Canada and, my God, I once managed a campaign in Salmon Arm, so I'm not unfamiliar with small communities in B.C.

Pique: What do you want the audience to take away from your talk?

SL: For me, April 14 feels like an eternity away, but I suspect I'll take a look at the (United Nations) Millennium Development Goal on Gender Equality and discuss some of the issues that have emerged, and what I have learned from observing the forces at work and hope people will come away from the evening with a strong sensibility that this is an important struggle for women's rights and gender equality.

I salute the (Howe Sound) Women's Centre for what it's doing, for its plans, and I want to be associated with it.

Pique: Tell me a bit about the Stephen Lewis Foundation and your current work.

SL: The foundation continues to thrive. I'm stunned by the consistent generosity of Canadians. It's a foundation that doesn't draw money from the government, and not more than a tiny amount from corporations. It draws its money from family foundations and from individuals.

The foundation receives about $10 million or more a year. When we started it, Illana, my older daughter and I, we thought we'd be lucky if it brought in $300,000 a year, but it has grown and we support at any given moment 150 to 170 projects in 15 African countries. They are countries with a high prevalence of HIV and AIDS.

It's a highly feminist sensibility focused on women who are living with AIDS and women in the community, and also the community health workers who sustain the communities, but we work directly at the grassroots. We put our money into community bank accounts that are run largely by women, we work on food, clothing, shelters, and, of course, the grandmothers' movement, which is central to the life of the foundation.

Pique: I understand that you first went to Ghana in the 1960s so how, for you, have the concerns about Africa changed?

SL: There's still indescribable poverty that wracks the continent and there's far too much conflict on the continent, there are communicable diseases and other diseases — and the combination of poverty, conflict and disease means that Africa is still struggling.

The continent is moving, consistently, to a greater number of democracies but there's this constant problem — it happened last week in Mali — where you have a military coup. And there is the phenomenon now of individual leader like Museveni in Uganda, Mugabe in Zimbabwe and Kigame in Rwanda — clearly they'd like to spend a lifetime in office.

So the democratic instinct is still a struggle and the economic growth is still a struggle, the desperate need to overcome poverty is an intense and ongoing struggle. Nowhere in Africa will any one country meet the (UN) Millennium Development Goals for the year 2015. There may be some individual goals, like elementary education, reached in some countries, but by and large it will be the continent that is furthest behind in the quest for the goals on which the international community has agreed.

I'm crazy about Africa. I love the generosity of spirit, the extraordinary and intense human decency and intelligence and sophistication at the grassroots, and I love the music, which envelopes everyone as soon as you step onto the continent. I have three or four more trips to make this year already scheduled and I can't wait to go.

I feel there is a tremendous resilience and inherent heroism in the struggle for survival that grips the continent, yet they are breaking through. There are many countries that are doing better and better and there is a real prospect to turn things around.

Pique: What do you want Canadians to understand in terms of Africa? Would you like us to understand it better?

SL: I would. I'd like them to understand that it's a continent that you should never write off, as difficult as the problems are. It remains a continent of hope, and when people ask me what sustains me — presuming I see a lot that is pretty grim, and I do — what sustains me is the strength at the grassroots, the strength primarily of women of the continent. They are so determined to overcome adversity. Nothing stops them.

And even in the most horrendous of circumstances, like the rapes in the Congo, spending time with the women who have been raped and who have had their reproductive tracts restored through surgery, even those women are incredibly strong and determined to protect other women and ensure it doesn't happen to others, to break through the male predatory sexual behaviour. There's just so much sophistication and so much warmth and generosity of spirit that is hard to convey.

What one hears and reads of Africa is so negative in so many instances and yet even in the negative moments there is great strength.

Pique: Having checked your schedule, I know that before coming here you will be speaking in Winnipeg and then you are going on to Delhi. Are there any threads that you see binding these three places together?

SL: In Winnipeg I will be speaking at the university and obviously, in Squamish, I will be speaking to gender equality as well, and the reason for my trip to India is to visit sites of sex work and sex trafficking. I'm going with a small group and one of the members is Gloria Steinem and I am looking forward to it. We're friends and it will be great to travel there with her for it.

We're going under the auspices of a foundation that cares greatly about international sex trafficking called the NoVo Foundation out of New York. They care deeply about these issues and they've arranged for a small group of people to visit the sites and understand more fully what is happening and then talk about it afterwards.

A slight digression — I've spent the last year and a half as a member of the Commission on HIV and the Law. It's a 15-member commission of people from around the world who have some knowledge of the subject matter... I feel a little eclipsed by most of them, but it's a very impressive commission created by the United Nations Development Program. It's an independent commission and has a technical advisory group of 25 remarkable and learned people.

We've been dealing with key populations like men who have sex with men, sex workers, injecting drug users, prison populations, migrant populations, and women, children and intellectual property rights because there's a way it can impinge on access to medicines.

So I've been dealing with the last year and a half in issues related to sex workers.

I'm just very appreciative that now, when it's alive in my mind, I can go to India and see what is on the ground, which gives a completely new perspective.

Pique: It sounds like you are keeping up your relationship with the UN in many ways.

SL: Yes. Inevitably our paths continue to cross. From time to time I speak at UN meetings, the human rights council, that kind of thing.

Next week Stephen Lewis talks about Canadian politics, the attack on the women's movement in Canada, and his moving eulogy at the funeral of his friend, federal NDP leader Jack Layton.